


Gold

by greytaliesin



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 06:49:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greytaliesin/pseuds/greytaliesin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Gold. Damned gold. Everybody thinks on it, Seeker, at one point or another. And you can all but see it in their eyes when they do."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Volume I: Varric

_Volume I: Varric_

—-  
After the expedition, Varric’s eyes no longer light up when he talks about gold. 

Hawke notices he doesn’t take his time describing the seductive way light slides over the stuff when he tells the story about the Tevinter idol with the jeweled eyes that cursed two hundred men of Orzammar to their deaths in the Deep Roads. Hawke’s heard it three times now—three different stories, nearly, and it makes his head hurt to sort out which is the proper.

He leans toward the way Varric tells it now—bleak and hopeless. Two hundred men didn’t know what their greed would buy them—gold’s only seductive as far as a man’s eyes pay attention, and that story hits home now.  
“So wots ‘appened to them all?” a skinny Fereldan man asks around his belch, his lips hanging open like a hound’s. All these men are Fereldan—the Hanged Man’s known as “the Hanged Fereldan Man” in lower circles; Corff’s the only one who will open his tap to them, with a Fereldan mother himself, but he’s stern with the tabs. At least he doesn’t charge extra for the dog smell.

“What happened?” Varric repeats for effect, and Hawke licks foam from his cracked upper lip. “Why, nobody knows for certain. And that’s not me calling the shit for a dramatic ending, I mean it. Nobody knows for sure.”

“What d’you think ‘appened, then,” his avid listener rephrases, whistling sharply around two fingers for another round.

“It drove them all mad,” Varric says, but his grin doesn’t reach his eyes. “They listened to gold speak to them through the emeralds all the way to the deadest of trenches. It probably told them they didn’t need food, didn’t need drink. And they probably listened to its promises. For the promise of a hundred sovereigns, two thousand sovereigns, the hoard that idol came from, the selfsame will of some Tevinter magister… well. For a hundred sovereigns most dwarves would eat their own foot. Eating a brother’s foot instead… well, just means you get to keep your own to walk on. If they didn’t kill each other, the Roads did the way they tamp the life out of any man.”

His voice is soft, and like there’s no gleam on the gold in his story, there’s no gleam in Varric’s eyes. Merrill mistakes it for dramatic effect, smiling over her mug and blowing at the buttery froth. Hawke knows better. Anders goes quiet in the corner, twisting the ring on his finger.

There’s a deep hole there between them like deep roads—a seat Carver used to fill. Hawke forgets not to buy a drink for his brother, too, and even if Isabela sidles in and takes it with a grin—“you shouldn’t have”—it doesn’t mean Garrett forgets just why that’s a habit.

“Every man’s got a price,” says Varric, quietly.

—-


	2. Volume II: Carver

_Volume II: Carver_

—-

The only gold Carver sees after they drag him out of the Deep Roads is his first stipend a month after his Joining—two gold sovereigns wrapped in thin, translucent vellum and stamped with a blue griffon seal. 

Two damn sovereigns. 

He runs his thumb over the edge of one gold coin. He’s used to callouses but they issued him a new sword with a fine black leather grip, one that’s reopened all his blisters and he’s careful not to roll the stamped gold against sore and oozing skin. Garrett’s probably ruddy rolling in money now, from the spawn Carver helped to kill and the treasure Carver helped to carry, and he sees two sovereigns for a month of work and choking down damned demon’s blood. Darkspawn blood. Whatever it was.

“Not a bad stipend, eh?” one of the friendlier men laughs, elbowing Carver roughly. Most of the Wardens are grey as their name tells, grim and stony men and women with drooping mustaches and drooping eyelids. Not this man—wiry and small, a murderer before he was a Warden, or so Stroud tells him. Not a bad stipend—“two gold for a month’s work is a wealthy man in Ferelden!” 

He laughs raucously and a few of the others join in with him, but Carver knows the insult and he wrinkles his nose, squeezing the coin in his fist. “Two gold’ll buy one whore for you and one for your hound!” 

They laugh and the next gold Carver sees is the man’s golden tooth knocked from his mouth, his knuckles split and bleeding, the barracks leaping up in a loud roar all aflutter at the sight of blood. Carver’s own blood rushes to his ears and he’d knock the nose off him next when his wrist’s caught. 

“You ruddy fool,” Nathaniel Howe snaps. He’s strong for a wiry man. “They won’t stop, so put your fists away. Save it for something worth it.”

Carver clutches the vellum envelope and his two gold sovereigns, rubbing his split knuckles with a ginger grimace as he flops back onto a bench. “They joined up after the Blight,” Howe says, “to them you’re a Fereldan in their land on their pay. They’ll learn soon enough, once they meet their first spawn.”

“They’ve never fought darkspawn?” Carver asks. Nathaniel rubs the shadow of a beard beneath his chin, sucks in a wet sound like a cold. “And they’re made Wardens?”

“Wardens don’t care what a man was before. Stroud told you that much, didn’t he? Men of skill aren’t always men of honor.” Nathaniel sucks his tongue against an eyetooth, picking dirt from beneath his nails with the sharp edge of his blade. “They’ll learn it’s not worth the stipend, this work.”

Carver thinks of Garrett swimming in his damn tub filled with dwarven gold, and he drops his two sovereigns in his foot locker. He wraps the murderer’s gold tooth in a shred of burlap and keeps that too.

—-


	3. Volume III: Isabela

_Volume III: Isabela_

—-

“They were golden. Really. Golden like statuettes.” Isabela dreams of gold, and Varric says if there was anything that would capture her heart for long, it was the lick of light on golden crowns and toe rings and cuffs and chains. When she tells the story about the brothel in Llomerryn where they paint the girls gold from head to toe, Anders doesn’t believe her. 

“Golden girls with ruby chips in their noses and onyx eyes,” he says, and she stretches and cracks her knuckles, bangles jingling. Garrett knows Isabela wears her gold where she can—a stud in her lip, her mismatched jewelry. She wears all the gold she has—and she told him once sardonically most of it was only bronze anyways. 

“Oh, you wouldn’t know,” she says knowingly, her eyes lit as she tugs on one of her earrings, “Ferelden men—and women— have boring appetites. From all the potatoes and broth you eat, it makes you happy just to find a girl who’ll pull her dress over her head. All your brothels are the same. But Llomerryn—” she digs the tip of her knife into the table with an incisive grin, and Garrett wonders if Varric didn’t learn to tell stories from her, grinning behind his knuckles. “Llomerryn’s a city of the world. Men want tastes of home—they want Antivan girls wrapped in fishnets and scaled like mermaids—of course, without the poison. And the men of Rivain fall in love with the golden statues built out on the jetties, and that brothel paints the goods gold and sells a night with a statue. It’s not worth the three sovereigns they charge and the place has got fleas something fierce, but it is fun to have gold paint smeared all over your thighs for a week afterward.” She chuckles, and Anders has to grin. 

“For three sovereigns, I’d stick to the Lay Warden,” he sighs—with a touch of homesickness in his voice. Fereldan those brothels may be and a man of the Anderfels he was born, but his first girls and his first men were all Fereldan, even if he doesn’t miss the smell.

Isabela smiles her wiry grin and digs a notch in Corff’s table, and the light glints off her gold. “You had a golden girl?” Garrett asks, sucking ale off his dirty pinkie, the blister stinging. 

“I had two,” Isabela says, “wicked girls they were, too. They tried to get me so drunk I’d be happy just watching while they cut my coin from me. One nearly got my earring. Clever fingers, that girl.” Anders chokes on his ale, and Isabela grins and slaps him on the back. 

“Was it worth it?” Garrett asks.

“Was it worth it to be robbed by golden girls? Makes for a good story, certainly,” Isabela laughs, throwing her head back. The light catches on her dusky skin. “I had to try it. Try everything once, I say, and who can pass up girls of solid gold? I got my coin back after the fight. You know me. I don’t let coin slip easily through my fingers.”

“You’d have liked them better if they were solid gold,” Garrett grunts—and Isabela’s lips twitch, laughing again. 

“I would have,” she says, like a nimble riposte, her eyes flashing. “Gold doesn’t betray you in the end,” she says cheerfully; Varric’s quiet for the rest of the evening after that, tugging his mug close. 

“No,” Anders agrees, scratching his chin. “The people who want it do.”

—-


End file.
